Animal Farm (George Orwell)
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
The Great Divorce (C.S. Lewis)
Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
The Cross and the Switchblade (David Wilkerson)
Go Ask Alice (anonymous)
(The last two changed my life because of the time in my life that I read them. I was a young girl in the mid 70’s experimenting with drugs. Those books probably scared me from getting HEAVY into drugs. I avoided chemicals and only did “natural drugs mostly because of those books.)

@unused_bagels I’d be lying if I said that the Bible has had no influence on my life. It most certainly has, and much of it has been positive. No matter what angle one comes at the Gospels in particular, something positive can always come away from their study, IMHO.

But then I “used to be” a person of faith, and am now wholly uncertain of my convictions. I can’t speak for how everyone might react to the Bible as a whole or in its individual parts, but much of my reaction even today is positive, even when I disagree or find something to be archaic—I still learn something of value.

Maybe not life changing, but certainly life enhancing:
The Bible
The Books of Charles Fort
The works of Nietzsche
The Gnostic and Apocryphal works – especially Thomas and Phillip
The writings of Robert Silverberg – especially Nightwings
The writings of Keith Laumer – the entire Retief series

The Bible. No words really, just a very precious book to me.
Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo – it really shows the stark contrast between love, lust, infatuation and obsession.
Also Charles Chaplin’s autobiography – the first half touches me profoundly. It really is a story of rags to riches – moving but also very scary what he had to endure (severe poverty and his mother’s mental illnesses) at such a young age.
Also Who Moved My Cheese? made me think a lot about what I wanted in life.

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, which won the National Book Award in 1974, I believe. (Wikipedia article) I read his book The Crying of Lot 49 before that, but Gravity’s Rainbow really struck home with me. The post-modern miasma of the book and the wide range of deep subject knowledge were inspiring. I related to the writing in a way that many books don’t reach me. In a weird way, it’s beautiful.

Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson is probably as different from Gravity’s Rainbow as you can get. It is nonfiction, and it is about the meaning of language in classical Greek literature up to the present. It is about love. This is a book I believe every writer and reader of great literature should read.

I buy anything written by these two authors as soon as it comes out. Their writing inspires me.

Being and Time by Martin Heidegger, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by Richard Rorty, The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault, most of Freud’s oeuvre but in particular his late paper “The Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense,” The Animal That Therefore I Am by Jacques Derrida, Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard, Inner Experience by Georges Bataille, The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir, Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, Language Truth and Logic by Alfred Ayer, At the Mind’s Limits by Jean Amery, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Plato’s Symposium and the Phaedo, and all of Philip K. Dick.

@JudiAlice was indeed a freaky book. I’m just glad I found out that it is fiction and not a real autobiography as advertised before I let it scare me out of what turned out to be by and large fulfilling experiences with drugs.

Being and Nothingness by Jean Paul Sartre. I read this when I was in college. The book was very influential in the development of my world view. It both gave voice to what I was feeling, and provided a lot for me to think about.

The works of Franz Kafka give expression to my inner demons the way that the painting The Scream does.

I am a little embarrassed to mention this but I have also been influenced by The Road Less Traveled by Scott Peck. It is not that well written and I don’t go along with the religious stuff at the end, but I really liked the discussion of love in terms of the time and effort one is willing to put into a relationship.

A few books by Rushdie, including The Satanic Verses. (not bible, @ragingloli )
A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft
The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
When I was really young, probably 11 or 12, I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull and it did help me see the world as being perhaps a bigger place than just the tiny town I was growing up in and helped me focus on what I was capable of and not to look at the person beside me for comparison or validation, so I shamelessly put it here on this list.
I read all the usual in high school, Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm, Brave New World, 1984 and quite a bit of Asimov and Herbert and they all had a hand in how I still view the world and people in general.